


rainbow cataract

by gogollescent



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-28
Updated: 2011-03-28
Packaged: 2017-10-17 08:19:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/174802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"For a Seer, your vision of events surrounding you is rather limited. It's charming."</p><p>Even charms have power.</p><p>Written for homestuck1000.</p>
            </blockquote>





	rainbow cataract

Rose never scries Kanaya. The crystal ball sits heavy in the cage of her fingers for something like two solid hours, its depths as slow and mobile and strange as a tide pool gathered up into a globe, but not once does she push down through the whiskery things and under the barnacles of alien stars after Kanaya's face.

Or- well. That's not quite it. Her handsome orb responds to the pressure of her thoughts, and there are times when it is very hard not to think of the eyes glossing over her distantly delivered words. Rarely, at the heart of a glinting many-edged conversation, a moment of silence will flower, as sudden and strange as a petal in a surgery: and then there is no question of not scrying, there is only the choice to close her eyes at the first flicker of cool stonegreen gray.

She has seen other trolls. On a whim, she's sought out John's dangerous friend, and watched her carve a trail of glitter through darkened halls. What looked like the blue shadow of wings fanned from her slumped shoulders.

She finds John's erst-and-otherwhile murderer, too, and has to stop to catch her breath when the girl lifts her nose from her keyboard and smiles at Rose, from across minutes, and also years. An awful, lovely smile, like the arc of light round a bullet hole in glass.

From these brief forays she learns that trolls have children's silhouettes and wolves' dentition; she learns that while they all have horns, the shape varies from troll to troll as much as it does from species to species, on Earth.

She learns that they are all terribly tired.

As it turns out, the granite humanity of their every expression only makes it harder to resist the urge to look her up. Because they are so readable, she has no hope of deluding herself into imagining Kanaya's features a foreign scrawl, instantly forgettable to her untutored brain. If Rose once sees at that face, she'll never stop, in the dark behind her eyes.

She admits to herself, in the trembling silence of LOHAC, that there is no dusting of rationality on the smooth wall of this resistance. No reason, not even one of courtesy, to avert her gaze. It is no act of theft, scrying trolls. Kanaya was the one mentioned that their client had a viewport function. Kanaya knows what Rose looks like; has perhaps seen her at every age, in every imaginable posture. (God knows Rose has had to adopt some more than usually creative ones, this past afternoon. Fighting atop a crest of terriblehorrendous phloxen flame had been a marvelous concept and not actually all that impractical in execution, but it meant that, all too often, she ran out of room and time and breath and even luck. It meant relying at the oddest points on the compressibility of human limbs.)

And it's that, she thinks, that stays her eye. She has been many things in her life, but never before has she been watched.

Kanaya speaks of mirrors and silence, choosing words that taste cold and perfect when Rose mouths them to herself, like very slender slivers of ice. But Rose remembers the reality of quiet reflection. In her castle, as glassy as if uprooted from aphorism whole, she used to find herself face to face with truth over breakfast every morning, when her mother came swaying down the stairway behind her, and on the opposite wall her still face broke and reformed with each uncertain step, the clean transparent curve of each slack cheek cut all to pieces by the dark boughs of the pines that lay beyond.

They never spoke before noon, and then in a language which was not and never would be anyone's native tongue: the words dropped away as soon as they were said, unheard in the busy rush to locate the true meaning.

To be watched, then; to be advised and observed and, oh, god, to be _nagged_ ; and to have all this unimaginable indulgence run down to her from an invisible hand- it is a gift without a corresponding unit of measure.

And Rose Lalonde keeps gifts received, until they're taken from her.


End file.
